The Seattle Flu Study (SFS) and the Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network (SCAN)

 In 2018 the Chu lab helped design and implement the Seattle Flu Study, a large-scale collaborative initiative designed to examine flu and other respiratory viruses and ascertain how viruses enter into a city, how they spread, and how they cause outbreaks in certain communities. The study was designed to help inform the development of new infrastructure systems to help prevent the spread of pandemics in Seattle and other metropolitan locations around the world. The Chu lab worked with Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle Children’s Hospital and several other UW labs to enroll individuals at traditional sites of care (hospitals and clinics) as well as in community locations (airports, transit stations, daycare facilities, homeless shelters, and college campuses) and households and via mail-in samples. In 2019 the shelters and households sites expanded into substudies as clinical trials. The study became extremely relevant in 2020 and has since been rebranded as SCAN (Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network) and shifted to almost exclusively focus on COVID-19, specifically expanding the mail-in collection substudy.